Sunday, August 23, 2009

Social Media Overload

I’m getting tired of invites to new social media sites. I have nothing against new sites popping up. I’m a great fan of competition. The more competition, the more everybody wins. But I’m getting tired of getting spammed with tons and tons of copycat social media sites. One of my Plaxo contacts keeps sending me invites to something called ecademy. It’s supposed to be a place for professionals to hook up. Oh, you mean, like, LINKEDIN?

I got the following just now:

Hey Eric, Have you heard of Faves? It's an easy way to save and share links to the stuff you find on the web - stuff like videos, articles, music and just about anything else. You just click a button when you see something you want to share, and you've created a Fave that all your friends can see. It's really easy to sign up, and it's completely free! Come check out the cool stuff I've been sharing.

I’m not sure what this is supposed to be. “an easy way to save and share links to the stuff you find on the web”. I already have that. It’s called Delicious. You can follow the stuff I save and want to share here. Oh, and I can “click a button when I see something I want to share” using delicious. I’ve been doing it for years. I can also save and share videos on Twitter, my blog right here, YouTube, and several others that I can’t think of right now.

Come on, Faves, you’re late to the party. I know this wasn’t personal. This email came through a contact that I have on another social network. It’s somebody I don’t really know. Somehow we became “friends” on that network, so he signs up for Faves, they access his address book, and I get an email.

I would like to see somebody come up with a concept that is truly unique. Then I might be interested. Twitter was new, MySpace was new, FaceBook was new, and I jumped on all of them. I’m honestly not very excited to get an invitation to yet another copycat of the stuff that already works and I’m already using. This is almost as bad and unoriginal as another distribution of Linux. I will, however, give points to Hannah Montana Linux. That’s unique.